Here is the Walnuts and Bolts 6643 Robot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78LrvXZCPgc
And our gear system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fewN6_RmEAc
Please tell us what you think, it is our rookie year and we want to know how our robot looks and preforms!
This is the ideal bot for any rookie to build. You guys definitely are on the right path. Be sure you get in a lot of solid practice!
Good luck!
Interesting mechanism. Check your compliance with G24.
G24. Don’t throw GEARS at all. A ROBOT may not LAUNCH a GEAR.
Violation: YELLOW CARD.
The suspence of the gear system video was killing me until the end haha. Good looking rookie year robot.
We took that into consideration. After some discussion with FIRST Help Now, we decided that it was ok because the rule, in our opinion, is meant to stop teams from throwing gears across the field.
I must ask how many people are on the team? But the robot is looking nice and clean, good job.
Head referees have different minds than FIRST Help Now. I would drive the robot to the peg as close as I could get before I pushed it out just to be safe.
With all of this said, you should be quite competitive at your events. Well done!
I’m a ref (taking the exam tonight). There isn’t any “intent” written into the rule, and you really don’t want to get into the grey area of having a head ref judge legality. The ref doesn’t care what the GDC ‘intended’ (unless they clarify it specifically during the driver’s meeting) since we could spend weeks reverse-engineering “intent” and still get things wrong. The refs care about what the GDC wrote into the rules/Q&A.
I can say that you do not want the gear in contact with nothing but air at any point if the gear was propelled by your robot regardless of what your drivers are trying to do. If the tip of the peg is already in between the gear spokes before the bot exerts its rapid force it, the gear is always touching something and therefore you’ll have a much easier time convincing us that it’s enthusiastically placed rather than launched.
Additionally, if a defender pushes you just as you push the gear, and the gear misses, then a ref is likely to call it a launch unless the gear was already in contact with the peg prior to your launch. And that presumes the ref saw exactly what happened…
Do not be discouraged though - all you need is a simple adjustment of play style.
You guys are looking good! My main advice is to triple check all of the rules to make sure you guys are legal at all times, because even the most experienced teams have those problems! Other than that, I say you guys built a really good looking mechanism that wasn’t so complicated that you had tons of problems, which lots of teams do and end up ruining their season because of it. You guys will have a great time, and I hope you do well! Good luck!
We have about 12 people signed up, but only 4 or 5 actually put significant work in on the robot.
Thank you so much for clarification! We will definitely do our best to not shoot the gear out. After the video was shot, I also turned down the amount of air going to the piston so it has less force.